Pizza with extra crunch at the newly revamped Artichoke
The former Middle-Eastern restaurant serves new-fangled versions of the Italian favourite with mixed results
Restaurant rebrand
Artichoke Pizza Parlour #01-02 New Bahru 46 Kim Yam Road Singapore 239351 WhatsApp: 9650-2290 Open Wed to Sun: 11 am to 10 pm. Tues: 5 pm to 10 pm. Closed on Mon
ARTICHOKE Pizza Parlour is where self-restraint goes to die. Where keto acolytes renounce their no-carb teachings and return to the god of gluten. Where pizza puritans contemplate the truism that pizza has to be round. Where people like us go and wonder: Is this pizza or fried focaccia with fillings?
As you might guess, this is no place for delicate appetites or practitioners of clean eating. It’s a temple of carbo excess, and you’re either a believer or you’re not. It’s full-on, in-your-face flavour bombs that leave nothing to your imagination and subscribes to the mantra that more is always better.
So against that backdrop, you have the re-imagined Artichoke, which has traded in its unique interpretation of Middle-Eastern cooking for a no-holds-barred approach to pizza. It’s hearty, rough and no-frills – kind of like roti prata for the Margherita crowd. It’s self-described dude food, where lasagne is considered a snack and crunchy-fried is the dominant flavour profile.
The casual, dressed-up canteen setup has an American diner feel, right down to the bold fonts and cartoony illustrations on the menu. It offers snacks, plates and pizzas – the latter divided into slabs, stacks and rounds depending on their shape and toppings/fillings.
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The menu helpfully advises the amount of food you should order: one snack, two pizzas/plates and one dessert for two people, and so on. Any more and you’ll have to bring out a doggie bag. The service staff are friendly but the pacing is not. The kitchen seems to want you out in a hurry even if the restaurant is only half full at lunchtime, and expects you to eat your snacks, plates and pizzas all at the same time.
Expect to be faced with a table heaving with lasagne nuggets (S$16 snack), burrata and strawberry kimchi salad (S$24 snack); crab and Korean rose cream pasta (S$32 plate) and Tropic Thunder (S$32) round pizza – wondering where to start. You can’t win. The food gets cold no matter how fast you try to eat.
The creamy burrata is no match for mouth-puckeringly sour strawberries tossed with fresh tomatoes and raw onions in a slightly spicy, oily kimchi dressing which tastes a bit like chilli jam. It’s the only carb-free option, so we gingerly pick out any tomatoes that haven’t been drowned in the sauce.
Just when you think lasagne can’t get any richer, nuggets or chunks of the ragu-layered pasta are rolled in crumbs and deep-fried just to prove you wrong. They’re served on a bed of tomato sauce. The crunch that gives way to soft noodles and sauce is a guilty pleasure of sorts, if you’re the kind that adds crushed potato chips to bologna sandwiches.
The crab pasta is already half-cold by the time we get to it, so it’s quite a stodgy plate of spaghetti in a creamy tomato sauce and topped with a thin layer of crab meat and crumbled nori. It’s pretty basic stuff, meant to fill you up so you have the energy to go back to building the nearest expressway after lunch.
Pizza is of course the signature offering and the rounds are the closest you get to the real thing. But the dough is baked and deep-fried – or the other way around, we’re not sure. There’s a faint streak of oil on the plate as you pick up a slice of dense, blistered crust that’s more doughy than airy, topped with parma ham, burrata, slivers of jackfruit and a nice drizzle of honey.
It doesn’t make an impression so we order a slab of bacon apple pie (S$32) which is rectangular, baked and presented on a wire rack. It has better crunch and texture than the round, and a spot-on topping of bacon, sweet apple puree as well as cooked wedges, and a scattering of hazelnuts. But it has more of a focaccia vibe than pizza – like a really crusty, olive oil-infused flat bread with imaginative toppings.
The stacks stretch the definition further. Dirty Duck is a salty mish-mash of pulled duck and green beans in a spicy Indonesian spice mix tucked between two layers of “pizza” crust. It’s an interesting if off-beat filling, but this is where the pizza stops and a good toasted sandwich begins.
In the end, we like dessert best. Mud cake (S$14) is a luscious, fluffy banana cake sandwiched with raisins and cooked bananas and drizzled with a warm chocolate sauce that leaves you with no question about its origins.
If it’s not pizza and it’s not bread, then what is it? It’s up to you to define Artichoke, and your conclusion will determine how much you buy into it.
Rating: 6
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